Last week, I saw acai powder in the grocery store for the first time. I had considered buying some of this online in the past to assist the blueberry powder I have for various oatmeal experiments, but the price tag of $24 for roughly 8 oz scared me away, at least for the day. Having talked to numerous friends about my research concerning the dried apple cubes I bought that are likely from China – which has a very negative reputation for food safety – I decided to also perform some research on the company that sold both the blueberry powder I own and the acai powder I knew they sold on Amazon.
Oh, goodness.
Searching for business and trademark registration information, the first thing I discovered is that the trademark functions as both the business name and a trademarked image owned by another company. I don’t quite understand how that works, but it’s basically a front company under which the brand is sold, but it’s owned by a trading company behind the scenes. Their lawyer is Chinese, and this lawyer’s law firm is so heavily Chinese that their website has a Chinese version, which seems to market itself a little more boldly, with additional images that are for some reason missing on the English version. Basically, the target audience is Chinese. Under almost the same name, they have some registrations in other countries, but they otherwise have a very small number of employees, which seems to be common for a lot of these food companies. They also had a lawsuit against them from a testing organization that found high amounts of lead in one of their seaweed products, and their supplements have widespread distrust among people writing on Reddit, some of whom determined that the active ingredient people were buying was 50% what it should be, thus explaining how this company was undercutting the market. They also don’t permit 3rd-party inspections.
I’m not an OSINT expert, nor do I know much of anything about how these businesses operate, but I’m starting to pick up a few sleuthing skills. I understand that USDA-certified Organic labels on imported foods are not completely reliable. Moreover, the Amazon listing for the acai powder answered the question of where it was sourced with an answer akin to “sourced from acai berries, which are natively grown in Brazil”, which is a bold deflection, as it doesn’t answer it’s own question, presented to the reader for marketing purposes. It wants you to think it’s from Brazil, but it doesn’t actually say that, it just says that it’s sourced from acai berries, which happen to be native to Brazil. You live long enough and you start to realize how businesses lie through their teeth.
Look, not all Chinese companies are bad. I want to be clear about that. And royally screwing up and bringing shame upon China will get you arrested over there and your life ruined, so if nothing else there are at least incentives to not screw up too badly. But my overwhelming impression is that the standards are still really bad, and people from neighboring Asian countries actively avoid any food from China. It feels like this company I’m looking at is just an international reseller with serious connections to China, redistributing under their own brand, who was maybe smart enough to go the extra mile to make everything look professional and tick all the hippie boxes, while taking shortcuts and overlooking their sources in order to establish a presence in the United States and garner a fanbase from people who don’t know any better.
And honestly…I’m questioning whether I really want to keep this blueberry powder.
See, we can talk all day about what’s healthy and what’s not, and that’s fine, that’s good. But one thing we have very little control over is the source of our food. There don’t seem to be any regulations requiring companies to list the country of origin for specific foods, and the moment different ingredients are combined, even the few companies that do list the country or countries of origin (premium olive oil, for example), immediately cease. I have a favorite blueberry oatmeal, which does include some blueberry powder, but I have no idea where that blueberry powder – or any of the other ingredients – came from.
Granted, what is blueberry powder, and why not just put blueberries in your oatmeal? It’s a perfectly fair question, and the answer is that I suck at eating fresh produce before it goes bad, and while freezing works great for smoothies, it doesn’t work so great for breakfast oatmeal. To me, these powders are a fun way to experiment with dry ingredients that add flavor, but since these are rarely the sorts of things you find in grocery stores (that acai powder being the first I had ever seen), it means you have to end up buying online from retailers who have not been vetted by grocery store companies which, for all their imperfections, are pretty keen to not sell food that will make their customers sick (at least, not in the short run).
This all makes me more interested in how our food is produced, how these companies operate, and what regulation has and has not accomplished. It’s a strange rabbit hole that, in a perfect world, nobody would have to go down, but even if you think you’re eating healthy food, there are ways in which the sourcing might mean it is slowly killing you. And that’s scary stuff. This is just one ingredient, goodness know where all of the companies get all of their ingredients. I suspect that too often, those cheap Chinese prices – born from cutting a few little corners at every step of the supply chain – might be a little too tempting for our profit-driven corporations.
If nothing else, there do seem to be better companies selling these sorts of things, and while people in Norway (for example) are just as human and prone to cutting corners, I suspect Norwegian food laws are likely more effective than those in China. Just a thought!